


rabbit hole

by shinyhappyfitsofrage



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post Season 9, im drinking mulder and scully are in love juice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 03:29:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13262691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinyhappyfitsofrage/pseuds/shinyhappyfitsofrage
Summary: It’s almost domestic, in a crooked sort of way. If she squints her eyes. If she doesn’t stare directly at it. This could be a grocery store list and Wal-mart could be a grocery store and they could have been on the road for ten minutes, not ten days. Instead of an endless continuing, a return could lay in wait afterwards. A home. Too bad she has perfect vision.(stopping for supplies while on the run, following 9x20 "the truth")





	rabbit hole

**Author's Note:**

> im fuming after season 11 premiere and so im rage posting this which has been sitting on my laptop for months. it's named after the play by david lindsay-abaire, from which i blatantly stole a line. as usual, i think there's a lot to explore about scully we didn't see, and in this case im interested in scully's own self-worth and image, etc? we all talk about mulder being depressed but one of the most disturbing parts of the whole series was how terrified scully was that mulder wouldn't forgive her for giving up william. so here this is
> 
> didn't proofread because im tired and angry but i will tomorrow, sorry in advance.

Scully wakes up as the sun is setting. Which, all things considered, seems fitting. They exist in half-lights now. They breathe in silhouettes.

It’s not much of a sunset, anyway. The sky is cloudy, has been all day, and because of the opacity the light is warped, hazy. More than hazy, it’s thick – it feels like paint, coating the trees, coating their car, coating her in a soupy sort of sunshine. She comes out of a dream (she isn’t keeping score but it tasted like another nightmare, all iron and acid) with a start and starts coughing, putting a hand on the glovebox to steady herself. She’s choking, on murky reds, on muddled, sweltering oranges.

Mulder’s smart, Mulder’s thought ahead. The sunglasses he’s wearing still have the tag on them from the convenience store they’d stopped at on the way to New Mexico. She can’t see his eyes as he glances over at her, but she knows that they are heavy, so heavy, like the sunset. “You okay?”

She nods vaguely as she bends down to grab the water bottle rolling around by her feet. It’s crushed in the middle and the water leaves dust on her tongue, but it’s enough to let her breathe. She leans her head back and sighs, her eyes closing. That’s enough sunset for now. “What time is it?”

The sound of his shoulder brushing against the seat, the sweaty t-shirt he’s been wearing since the beginning of Colorado shifting around his bones. Scully opens her eyes to catch the end of Mulder’s shrug. “Sixish, maybe”. The clock on the dashboard clearly reads 7:24. “I’m taking the next exit.”

“You are? Why?” It’s early to stop for the night, for him especially. Mulder has always liked to drive, drive, drive, far past any sensible time. When she had mumbled heavy-eyed protests, when his own body has betrayed him through yawns and blinks and nods, he’d always insisted on going just a little bit further.

“Just a few more miles,” he’d always promised her, unable to keep his own drowsiness out of his voice, and she’d pouted but had ultimately trusted him to eventually pull over when he felt they had come far enough.

But he isn’t stopping at a motel just then, at 7:24 pm in an undisclosed, unidentified location (stretches of highway collapse into stretches of highway, and while she thinks they’re still in Colorado she’s not sure anymore). “Supplies,” he tells her, and she nods.

The tag on the sunglasses flits in and out of her peripheral vision, like a mosquito. She has an oddly desperate need to reach up and rip it off. Pretend it’s something they owned, something they were able to pull a tired and knotted memory out of. Instead, it’s a cheap pair of glasses he bought in a 7/11 while she slept in a car that felt more permanent to her than any bed she and Mulder had ever shared. In a couple months, they’ll be left behind at a halfway home in Seattle, and while Mulder will later vaguely grumble about not having anything to shield his eyes when the sun hits the front window at a particularly harsh angle in December, the glasses themselves will not be missed.

Sometimes she suspects they’ll share the same fate.

* * *

 

The exit from the highway veers a sharp left, cutting downward past residential areas where the beige of dead grass bleeds into the beige of faded brick, past strip malls with a solitary car in the parking lot, past gas stations that are so familiar she swears they've been here before. Scully doesn't know the names of the town they drive through, the number of the exit they took. Specifics only matter when you want someone to find you. Being lost is easy.

All they have is a map of major highways, and even that has been distorted, so thoroughly creased from numerous and varying lopsided folding jobs that new tectonic plates were now tearing North America apart, a second Grand Canyon threatening to send the eastern seaboard into deep space. Nevertheless, Mulder's hand on the steering wheel is unflinching, and his examination of their surroundings is just as cursory as if any other driver's. If he didn't know where they were going, she doubts she would be able to tell. After several minutes on a nondescript freeway, he sees what he's been looking for. "Here we go," he murmurs under his breath as he takes the next right.

They pull into a Wal-mart parking lot. The sun is setting, slipping behind the grey block-shaped building, giving it a golden halo, the edges of what remains of daylight curling around and licking the stray shopping carts, the two dozen or so dusty cars parked outside. It makes looking directly at Wal-mart difficult, all discernable detail thrown into shadow. It's a solar eclipse if she ever saw one.

Mulder parks the car near the front of the store (hidden from view of passing cars, an easy getaway if they need it - they've been rewired to work in contingencies) and turns off the engine. Neither of them get out of the car immediately. The lack of sound is addictive in its eerie unfamiliarity. The hum of the engine has become a constant companion over the past week. She rubs her hand over her forehead and exhales, glancing out the window.

"It's weird," he says. He gestures to the neon of the Wal-mart sign, which actually reads _W l-mar_ due to faded neon. "To be somewhere you know."

There are so many things that are weird, she thinks. Her primary source of water is bottled, her phone is full of numbers she can't call. Her baby is somewhere else, learning to call someone else mama.

Six months ago, she'd clenched her teeth so hard she felt the bones in her jaw scream, as she sat on the edge of her too neatly made bed and listening to Agent Doggett tell her that they had found no new leads on any of the super soldiers. "I'm sorry, Dana," he'd said, and she'd nodded. William had laughed for the first time that morning and she'd been the only person in the apartment to hear it.

In the car, Mulder smiles wanly at her. "Yeah," she says. "It is weird.

* * *

 

The lighting is fluorescent, a startling tint of white. The past few days had been highway sunsets and motel room sunrises, yellow-light lamps he reached over her body to turn off as they went to sleep. Scully rubs her eyes blearily with one hand and once again wishes she'd brought sunglasses.

"Hi, how are you today?" says the greeter by the metal detectors, a teenager with a lip piercing and a monotone drawl. They offer thin smiles in response, quickly moving past her into the store.

It's a lot bigger than she anticipated. She stands by a tub full to the brim with Hershey products and waits for Mulder to get a shopping cart, reading over the list she'd made in the car on the back of a diner receipt. Toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, clothes for Mulder, hair dye for herself, notebooks, pencils, pens.

It’s almost domestic, in a crooked sort of way. If she squints her eyes. If she doesn’t stare directly at it. This could be a grocery store list and Wal-mart could be a grocery store and they could have been on the road for ten minutes, not ten days. A return could lay in wait afterwards, instead of an endless continuing. Mulder believes in the multiverse theory, as he’d once passionately declared in a Washington D.C. dive bar, his cheeks ruddy with liquor. In 1996, she’d resisted his attempts to convince her of its merits because it had been fun. She’d conceded to his attempt to kiss her for the same reason, but Mulder has been especially drunk that night and had missed, his lips landing on her temple like a jab cross. He would forget about it in the morning. She wouldn’t. Now, she hopes he had been right all along. It would be nice if this were only the sad version of them.

The high-pitched screech of the shopping cart wheels on the cold floor announces Mulder’s return. Scully snaps her wrist, shakes the receipt, and watches any traces of parallel universes disappear into the air. "Should we split up?" she asks him. “I'll head to electronics, you go to the men's section?"

"That sounds best," he agrees. He doesn't move. The light is so goddamn harsh on his face, hanging from his bones. He looks haggard, drawn. He needs a shave.

She doesn't move either. When he starts to push the cart towards the men's section, she follows.

* * *

 

"You should get this," and Scully looks up just as a balled up t-shirt hits her in the nose. She sputters, but manages to catch it before it hits the murky purple carpet. Faded blue, with a giant red S on the front, size large.

"Superman?" She can’t tell if he’s serious or not.

Mulder holds up a second, identical t-shirt he'd pulled off the sale rack. "Well, Supergirl, actually. Or Lois, I guess."

She scoffs at his conservativism (now, _that’s_ a new one), and also at his absurdism. Ten minutes in and he’s distracted. “I didn’t realize you were so conformist, Mulder”

“I’m not,” he says, too quickly. “But, I’m just _saying_. If anyone is going to be Clark, it should be me.”

He rests his elbows atop the rack, hunched over, watching her as she continues to thumb through shirt after shirt. When the plan to break Mulder out had been made, her mother had helped her pack over the course of half an hour, in silence, her older hands trembling. “Please don’t do this,” she’d begged, her voice low, as she roughly folded the few articles of clothing he’d left at her apartment. “Dana, please. This is your life, too.”

She’d never felt much like a Dana, anyway. Finding a promising looking black t-shirt, she pulls it off the rack and holds it out in front of her. Mulder becomes a blur behind the fabric. “Does this look like it would fit you?”

He takes the hanger from her and doesn’t even look at it before he tosses it in the cart. “Yeah.” It’s such an unquantitative method of deduction that she almost feels scandalized, although she really shouldn’t be surprised. She purses her lips and continues to search for anything usable. “Do you remember when I used to look like him?”

“Like who?”

“You know.” He at least has the sensibility to look sheepish. “With the glasses and everything. When I was young.”

She isn’t quite sure what he’s playing at here, but she’s sure he’s playing at something. That’s the scar an investigative career has left her. She sees the suspect in everything. She hears motive in every punctuation mark. But he must know this is a stupid and fruitless conversation for two people who only exist in security camera tapes, in rumors whispered into the ears of new cadets. Contrary to popular belief, ghosts don’t get invited to costume parties.

He is most likely trying to make her laugh. She isn’t sure for whose benefit. In Santa Fe, he had started to cry, sitting on the edge of the bed, as she had looked pointedly at the wall and explained as clinically as possible how it felt to lose him, and then everything else. “I’m sorry. I missed you so much,” he whispered when she’d shuffled across the bed and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. Maybe it was supposed to be affectionate, or some sort of apology. But it made her nervous. She was afraid of who _you_ meant.

Still, it’s nice to be stupid and fruitless sometimes, and it’s nice to stand around in a Wal-mart like they have all of the time in the world, and it’s nice to shake her head and roll her eyes at him in public spaces, only to brush her fingers along his wrist when no one can see. She can play along if need be. Frowning, she lets her eyes drift upwards to the _MENS_ sign hanging from the ceiling as she hums dramatically. “I don’t remember.” She does, very clearly. “But A.D. Skinner, on the other hand…”

Another t-shirt hits her in the nose. She laughs and the sound ricochets off the ugly white walls. Maybe it doesn’t matter who it’s for.

* * *

 

They decide they should buy food. It’s stupid to stop every time they need to eat, to waste forty minutes sitting on torn faux leather cushions in a grease stain, burnt bacon diner, to feel her heartbeat, sticky and impatient, just below the surface of her skin as she buys a ready-made sandwich from a gas station convenience store and prays to God that there isn’t a gun waiting for her in the aisle over. No, buying food they can take with them in the car is much better. She’s had enough overdone eggs to last her a lifetime. It will be nice to eat food that is somewhat _theirs_ (and again, Scully feels the prickle of another universe, brushing the nape of her neck like fingertips).

Of course, better is an entirely relative term. Scully stares down a generic brand fruit tray and tries to swallow down the sigh in her throat, tries to remind herself of the irrationality of being disappointed at fruit that can only loosely be described as fresh. This is not another universe, this is her beat-up, jagged edge one, and compared to the diners and inconvenience stores, an organized plate of only slightly off-colored cut fruit is a delicacy. Decadent, even. It’s certainly nothing for her to turn her nose up at. It’s more than she and her cowardice deserves.

But she would give anything right in that moment for a fresh strawberry. Whole and red and strangely heavy in between her thumb and her forefinger, the seeds spelling out lush, provocative secrets against her skin. She can almost smell it now, fragrant and sweet, almost feel the juice on her tongue, bursting out from the flesh as she bites into it.  

“Scully.” Mulder’s hand ghosts her elbow, and she is suddenly aware of how tightly she is holding the fruit platter, skin pulled taut around her knuckles. An intimation of one of those decorative Halloween skeletons, somehow perfectly intact, blindingly white. Real skeletons had always disappointed her.

She puts the fruit platter back. “Where do you think we could get fresh strawberries in Colorado?” She turns around to look at him. Mulder’s pushing the shopping cart, which now contains several boxes of cereal and two loaves of bread and a pack of water bottles and a rotisserie chicken, on top of the clothes and the camera and the batteries. It’s almost an entire life. He smiles at her, and there is so much tired, stupid love bleeding out from the crinkle in the corner of his eye, pooling on his lips like an expletive. It’s dripping off his chin. It has nowhere else to go. It makes her feel sad in a fundamental way. She doesn’t know what she can give him in return.

“We can stop somewhere,” he promises. She’s afraid to believe him. It’s almost like old times.

* * *

 

Too late she realizes that they’re in the infant department. It’s only probably eight-thirty, but it feels much later, and a white florescent headache was slowly but surely forming behind her eyes. She’s only been half paying attention, using the shopping cart Mulder was pushing to guide herself, when a blurry but familiar silhouette appears in her peripheral vision. Scully blinks. It’s a large stuffed elephant, wearing a yellow and green striped t-shirt.

“William had that,” she whispers before she realizes what she’s doing. Next to her, she feels Mulder tense, immediately alert. At their core, stripped of everything else, they’re just neatly bundled Quantico training, worn and weathered instincts knotted around standard operations that over time seeped into their bloodstream. It’s not his fault he reacted like their child’s name was a threat. It’s all they know.

The shopping cart comes to a gradual stop, the sound of the stuck wheel dragging across the linoleum that she hadn’t realized she’d become accustomed to disappearing. “Yeah?” he says, finally, with great effort.

She nods slowly, as if in a trance. William’s nursery is materializing in front of her as she speaks. The breeze coming in through the open window, blowing the curtains ever so gently. His crib in the center of the room. Mulder nowhere in sight. “Monica bought it.” Another name there’s no point in saying. “She’d been at the hospital, because Agent Doggett – well, it doesn’t matter, and there was this massive elephant in the gift shop. It had a different t-shirt, though. It said ‘Hope you feel _Well-ephant_ soon’ on the t-shirt, and she thought it was really clever, even though it was so stupid, and William wasn’t sick. And it looked ridiculous because it took up so much space in the nursery. Maybe that was the point.”

An announcement over the intercom, letting shoppers know that the store is closing in half an hour and to have a good night, brings her back to the Colorado Wal-mart, back to May 2001, back to Mulder. He says nothing, and she shouldn’t expect him to, but _God_ , she digs her nails into her palm and begs him to respond, to participate. _That sounds nice. I’m sorry I missed it. I forgive you_. What she wants to hear more than anything, if she’s being honest, is _I remember_ , but she’s not holding out. She knows the score.

* * *

 

The woman on the box of hair dye is smiling. Maybe she’s happy with her new darkest brown hair color, proud of her new beauty. What she can be best described as is cunning. Her perfect white toothed grin doesn’t line up with her eyes. She’s too entirely removed from the realm of real life existence – blank white background, any clothes she’s wearing hidden by her luscious, thick hair – to seem entirely human. An idea of a woman.

“Got one,” says Scully, taking the box off the shelf, and she feels a rush of self-hatred for the way her voice trembles, just a little bit, and once again scolds herself for her stupid childishness. It’s just _hair_ , for God’s sake. It doesn’t change anything.

Still, she remembers being sixteen and fumbling and cocky, grinning at herself in a mirror as Melissa made last minute adjustments on her wildly curled hair. “He’s going to remember you for _years_ ,” Missy had promised (it was Billy – _something_ , McCarthy or McArthur or something like that – from her algebra class, and her parents thought she was going over to Katie Wiseman’s to study, and the whole wide world had been her rebellion). “Gentlemen prefer blondes, sure. But no one ever forgets a redhead.” Hence the hair dye.

Mulder’s not listening, leaning on the handle of the shopping cart, staring unblinkingly at a crack in the linoleum. Up five feet and to the left of them. This is not uncommon. In poorly lit bathrooms, in the passenger seat of their rental car, at a gas station rest stop as they sit on an old wooden table, watch the cars whiz by on the highway, and try to pretend it’s a picnic. She’d glance over and he’d been gone, long gone. Stuck in the cracks of places he used to be, places he never knew. That was her guess, anyway. She’d never interrupted him. They spent their lives within fifty feet of each other at all times. They deserved respite, or so she’d tell herself as she fought the urge to grab him, slap him, shake him, kiss him. Anything to wake him up.

Now, though, she gingerly places her hand on his back, and feels him shudder ever so slightly as he comes back to her. He bows his head for a moment, scrunching his eyes shut, before turning to look at her. “Sorry,” he says. “Checked out for a moment there.”

She nods. They deserve respite, she reminds herself, but she still wants to sit him down and methodically pull his wanderings out of him, inch by tattered inch. Like a magician’s handkerchief, except this time no one’s smiling.

They keep walking.

* * *

 

They check out at exactly a minute before nine o clock, much to the irritation of the teenage cashier, who pops her gum and exhales a sharp acrid exhale at their shopping cart, piled to the brim. “This is rude as fuck,” she tells them outright. Mulder gapes, Scully fakes a laugh and musters a half-excuse, half-apology that just comes out as nonsense. In the parking lot, after they’ve checked out, pushing the shopping cart and its stuck wheel across the cracked pavement, he turns over his shoulder to look at the Wal-mart and laughs. The sound is too small and too large for the now all but deserted parking lot. Nothing to bounce against, it goes on for miles and miles.

“Only in Wal-mart,” he says. She laughs along with him. The sun had fully set while they were inside, and now Colorado is a murky damp black, and heavy too. She could feel its weight on her shoulders, feel it in the force of her breathing. It’s going to storm overnight, she thinks as she opens the trunk door. She tells Mulder this and he shrugs, purely to annoy her. “Maybe,” he says. She rolls her eyes.

They put the bags in the trunk in relative silence, nervously, quickly. The white lights and the faint sound of bland pop music are starting to fade in earnest now. In the dark any car belongs to the unspecified Them. Mulder pushes the cart off towards the cart corral and Scully gets into the car, starting the engine and turning the radio off. Mulder always blasted classic rock when he drove, but the sound of radio hosts blabbing is enough of a deterrent for her to choose silence.

Mulder gets into the car, not shutting the door hard enough for it to click shut. He opens it again and slams it shut. “I’m complaining to the rental company,” he tells her. “This car doesn’t work at all.” It’s an empty threat but a pleasant habit.

She’s not listening, not really. The light from the neon Wal-mart sign is now much brighter when surrounded by the night, the just barely blue light creating a mumbled, fragmented outline around Mulder’s silhouette. The parking lot lights blink and crackle in and out of her peripheral vision. The second eclipse of the day, and this time she gets stars.

“Do you wish you’d stayed away?” she asks. She regrets it immediately – she should know better by now. A decade of following him through locked door after locked door had taught her that unrelenting questions wrought unrelenting answers. Things unsaid stay alive longer.

It's not a look that has crossed his face many times, but Scully knows him well enough to recognize the expression of disbelief in his eyes, in the set of his jaw, sudden and bruised and overflowing. As if she’d beaten it out of him. “Why would you…” He turns in his seat to face her, leaning forward as though he might take her face in his hands. He doesn’t. “Why would you ever think that?”

God, she should’ve just left it alone, let the uncertain way the word _you_ fits into _I missed you_ eat at her flesh like a mosquito. She stares out the windshield. “It must have been – when you left, things were so different. _I_ was so different. And I hadn’t – if you had never come back, you would have had the benefit of the doubt. You could always assume things had stayed the same. That, somewhere, you had a family, living a normal life, and you could still believe coming home to that was a possibility.”

A silence, as murky and as heavy as the night sky outside. “Do _you_ wish I’d stayed away?”

Her hand slips off the wheel she’d been clenching, her palm slamming onto the dashboard air conditioner. “ _No_. Jesus. Of course not.” Sometimes, she’s amazed by how much she hates herself. “I just… I didn’t want you to know me this way.”

“This way?”

 _This way._ Guilty and furtive and tired. Nothing new to say about miles and miles and fucking miles of uncharted highways, just the same old taste in her mouth. Dry and cracked hands, occasionally bleeding because she can’t stop picking at her skin. Her stupid, unalienable grief. The self-inflicted crucifixion she wears around her neck.

She stays silent (she never has the right words, always has relied on theoretical frameworks to spoon-feed the language into her mouth). The question sits in the car with them, resting on the console between them, among the receipts and water bottles and napkins and car keys. Eventually, Mulder says, cautiously, “You’re still you.”

 _He doesn’t understand_ , she thinks. But his words are still oddly – if not comforting – steadying in their simplicity. He’d sit at his desk and build angles that didn’t exist, construct hidden agendas and malevolent intentions for every suit that walked into the Hoover building, but in a rental car in Colorado he looks at her with black and white eyes. She’s Scully. He’s Mulder. A truth that stands across universes, across sins.

She smiles, wipes away a tear she didn’t realize was there. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.” She reaches over and squeezes his hand briefly before shifting into drive. It’s a start.

* * *

 

When she wakes up at three in the morning (William was a finicky sleeper and his twilight hour screams are still wired into her internal clock), the rain is hitting the window pane, imbued with volume and strength by the wind. She turns to face him, nudging him determinedly until he blinks a bleary greeting at her. “I was right,” she whispers. It takes him a moment, but eventually he smiles in concession, brushes a piece of hair off her face, turns back into his pillow. The neon light from the motel sign outside their window, watery and constant and green, rocks her back to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> i really do subsist on ur kind words! thank u in advance xoxo


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